Tag: Traditional Chinese Medicine

May 6, 2016

Traditional Chinese Medicine at RMIT: roll up and start a new life in woo

RMIT Open Day TCM 2015

by: Mal Vickers

Imagine you’re in the midst of the stress of VCE and facing those life-changing questions: What do I do with my life? Which university course should I do? You’d want accurate and reliable information, right?

Sadly I witnessed an audience of impressionable, aspiring young people who were considering career moves being given poor information by an Australian university.

In August 2015, I sat in on RMIT’s Open Day presentations promoting a degree courses in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). By the look of the demographic in attendance, most were Year 12 students. About one quarter looked to be the parents, with a few possible mature-age students and one known skeptic, MOI.

Young people are going to be exposed to misleading information and dubious advertising in society, that’s a given. As a society, we’re already taking up a lot of valuable educational time in teaching science and critical thinking, but class time is limited. How much time should we devote to educating students about the many ways people can be misled?
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September 26, 2012

RMIT Open Day 2012 -Traditional Chinese Medicine

By Mal Vickers

I went along to Open Day at RMIT Bundoora.  Oh boy, where do I start?

As a skeptic, I’m interested in the courses offered that seem further along the woo scale than most. To be fair, I should point out that RMIT is a big university, the overwhelming majority of courses on offer are high quality, science or humanities based. However, this is a skeptical blog, RMIT’s Chiropractic and Chinese Medicine disciplines are of interest to me.

In 2011 I took a close look at Chiropractic, I asked some questions about the practice and wrote two blog posts (here and here). A year later my questions about Chiropractic, still remain unanswered.

This year, I thought I’d take a closer look at Chinese Medicine.

RMIT offers a range of courses in both Chinese herbal medicine and acupuncture, up to and including a degree in Chinese Medicine.

Before I get into the details, here’s a little disclaimer.

Discussing Chinese Medicine can be tricky, due to cultural sensitivities, so let me state what I’m trying to do up front. I question the ‘medicine’ part of the description ‘Chinese Medicine’. Saying something is a ‘medicine’ implies that it’s effective for, at least, some health conditions. The associated cultural grouping is irrelevant. I could be investigating ‘Collingwood Supporter’s Medicine’ or ‘Morris Dancer’s Medicine’ – it’s the ‘medicine’ part that interests me. I also wish to question View More RMIT Open Day 2012 -Traditional Chinese Medicine

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